In a typical phone conversation where both parties are not talking at the same time for most part, discontinuous transmission (DTX) saves the network bandwidth and power usage on handsets by transmitting information only when required. The standard adaptive multi-rate (AMR) speech codec does this by transmitting periodic encoded frames during speech (e.g., every 20 ms) but infrequent silence indicator (SID) frames during pauses/silence/noise (e.g., every 160 ms or greater). The receiver decodes the received speech and SID frames and injects comfort noise during the missing SID frames during DTX. The standard AMR speech encoder uses an inbuilt Voice Activity Detector (VAD) to determine the start and end of DTX transmission. However, this VAD is highly conservative and marks most real life noise as speech thereby losing the advantage of DTX for these types of real noises.